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Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media Elite

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Overview

"The Biggest Story the Media Won't Cover"

"The mainstream media have a fundamental role in our democratic process, one that it is essential to the health of the Republic, not to put too fine a point on it. So it is in everyone's interest that they not only survive, but also be widely respected. "This book is not about proving the existence of liberal bias in the media...Ultimately it is about making things better. The naked emperors can continue to deny and dissemble on the bias question, proudly marching on with their privates dangling in the breeze, but while they've been marching, the ship has already sailed. And the fat lady stopped singing a long time ago.
"They need to be saved-from themselves."

This is an attempt to reach out to every American with an open mind. Regardless of whether you're conservative or liberal or somewhere in between, this book will challenge your ideas...
ARROGANCE

In his #1 New York Times bestseller, Bias, Emmy Award-winning journalist Bernard Goldberg created a national firestorm when he exposed the liberal biases of the so-called mainstream media. Now Goldberg takes on Big Journalism and punctures the bubble in which the media elites live and work-a culture of denial where contrary views are not welcome. With blistering wit and passion, Goldberg offers a twelve-step program to help journalists overcome their addiction to slanted news and exposes the main culprits of arrogance in the media. He reveals:

- How the media's coverage of the Jayson Blair scandal missed far more serious problems at the New York Times

- Why the media refuse to shoot straight when the subject turns to guns

- Which CBS News icon is "transparently liberal," according to commentator Andy Rooney

- Why some think the top journalism school in America is an intellectual gulag

- How some journalists, like Bob Costas and Tim Russert, do get it-and how they think American journalism can be made better.

Editorial Reviews

Most people who hit the top of the bestseller lists with their first book would enjoy their success, but Goldberg (Bias) would rather grouse about how little media attention he got and how even his new publisher (he was previously with Regnery) doesn't understand why liberal bias in journalism is a "crucial" issue. His analysis of the media's "leftward" slant in coverage of social issues, buttressed by his own experiences as a CBS News correspondent and tales from anonymous colleagues, is not without its persuasive qualities, though undermined by rather obvious deck-stacking, condescension toward opposing viewpoints and intermittent outrageousness. He also drops hints about how news organizations bully interviewees to eliminate anything that might contradict what they broadcast an act of arrogance transcending ideological lines but quickly drops that story in favor of more liberal-bashing. And despite his admonition to media professionals to "stop taking [criticism] personally," Goldberg repeatedly makes it personal, taking shots at Barbara Walters, for example, or accusing New York Times columnist Frank Rich of attacking him as a favor to a college classmate. That's only a fraction of his complaints against what he sees as the paper of record's ideological stance, which he considers both far more pervasive and more important than the Jayson Blair scandal. (Nor, he says, is it a new problem, recycling criticisms of Stalin-era Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty that have recently gained favor among mainstream analysts.) Goldberg isn't just a lone voice in the wilderness, either, as interviews with Bob Costas and Tim Russert offer supporting perspectives. Still, this is pure, unadulterated Goldberg, with precisely the same combination of insider knowledge and righteous indignation that made him a hit the first time around
Copyright (c) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
-- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Bernard Goldberg

Bernard Goldberg, 1945 Bernard Goldberg was born in 1945 and has been involved in producing the news in some form since he began his career. he started out as a writer and editor for The Associated Press in New York in 1967. In 1969, Goldberg became a producer and writer for WTVJ-TV in Miami until 1970 when he switched to WPLG-TV as an investigative reporter for two years. He joined CBS in 1972 as a producer based in Atlanta, becoming a reporter for CBS in 1974 and a correspondent in 1976. He has remained with CBS since then, joining the San Francisco Bureau from 1977 til 1981. There he covered the 1980 Presidential Campaign of former California Governor Jerry Brown and the 1976 Republican National Convention. In 1981, Goldberg joined the New York Bureau, becoming a correspondent for the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather until 1988. He was also a frequent contributor to CBS news speeches during that time. In March of 1989 he was named special correspondent for 48 Hours, contributing more than 100 reports in four years. In the summer of 1991, Goldberg became a contributing correspondent to the CBS Primetime Series Verdict and the next year he helped to launch the CBS Newsmagazine, Street Stories. Goldberg eventually ended up as a correspondent for Eye to Eye with Connie Chung, winning an Ohio State Award for an Eye to Eye report on the decline of civilization in the last 30 years. He hosted the "Don't Blame Me"special one hour primetime Eye to Eye that explored the trend in American culture to not take responsibilities for their actions. In the course of his career, Goldberg spent three decades with CBS, received six Emmy nominations, an Ohio State Award and a Sigma Delta Chi Award. He wrote the book "Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News" which discussed the liberal bias inherent in the news, a situation that Goldberg abhorred.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Hachette Book Group USA

Filesize

576.61 KB

Number of Pages

328

eBook ISBN

9780446405607

Excerpt from: Arrogance by Bernard Goldberg

Introduction

So I'm sitting in a very nice conference room in the very nice Time & Life Building, high above bustling West Fiftieth Street in Manhattan, for my first meeting on this book. There are about ten big shots from Warner Books sitting around a very nice long table waiting to hear what I have in mind, which basically is to use my earlier book Bias as a jumping-off point to examine the powerful behind-the-scenes forces that have turned too many American newsrooms into bastions of political correctness; to examine those forces and see why they generate bias in the news and how they sustain it; and to tell the media elites, who are too arrogant to see for themselves, the ways they'd better change if they want to stay relevant. Because if they don't, they'll cease to be serious players in the national conversation and become the journalistic equivalent of the leisure suit--harmless enough but hopelessly out of date.
But as I'm sitting there I'm not thinking about any of that. To be perfectly honest, what I am thinking is, before Bias caught on with so many Americans, before it became such a hit, no one in the liberal, highbrow book business would have thrown water on me if I were on fire. None of them would have dirtied their hands on a book that would have dismayed their smart, sensitive liberal friends. Before Bias I would have been the skunk at their garden party. But now they can't wait to hear what I think?
But about fourteen seconds in, I am brought back to earth when one of the participants informs me that a friend of his thinks the whole idea of liberal bias is bogus.
I smile the kind of insincere smile I detest in others and look at the guy, wondering if I'm also looking at his "friend." I'm also wondering if everyone else in the room also thinks that bias in the news is just the stuff of right-wing paranoia. I am in Manhattan, after all, the belly of the beast.
And besides, Manhattan is one of those trendy places where the new hot media chic thing is not only to dismiss the notion of liberal bias in the news, but actually to say, with a straight face, that the real problem is . . . conservative bias!
This is so jaw-droppingly bizarre you almost don't know how to respond. It reminds me of a movie I saw way back in the sixties called A Guide for the Married Man. In one scene, Joey Bishop plays a guy caught by his wife red-handed in bed with a beautiful woman. As the wife goes nuts, demanding to know what the hell is going on, Joey and the woman get out of bed and calmly put on their clothes. He then casually straightens up the bed and quietly responds to his wife, who by now has smoke coming out of her ears, "What bed? What girl?" After the woman leaves, Joey settles in his lounge chair and reads the paper, pausing long to enough to ask his wife if she shouldn't be in the kitchen preparing dinner!
Joey's mantra in such situations is simple: Deny! Deny! Deny! And in this scene his denials are so matter-of-fact and so nonchalant that by the time the other woman leaves the bedroom, leaving just Joey and his wife, her head is spinning and she's so bamboozled that she's seriously beginning to doubt what she just saw with her own two eyes. She's actually beginning to believe him when he says there was no other woman in the room!
Just think of Joey Bishop as the media elite and think of his wife as you--the American news-consuming public.
You have caught them red-handed over and over again with their biases exposed, and all they do is Deny! Deny! Deny! Only now the media have become even more brazen. Simply denying isn't good enough anymore. Now they're not content looking you in the eye and calmly saying, "What bias?" Now they're just as calmly turning truth on its head, saying the real problem is conservative bias.
What's next? They look up from their paper and ask why you're not in the kitchen preparing dinner?

Having been on the inside for as long as I have, twenty-eight years as a CBS News correspondent, I should have known it would be just a matter of time before they would stop playing defense and go on the offensive. Given their arrogance, I should have known that sooner or later they would say, "We don't have a bias problem--and if you think we do, then that proves that you're the one with the bias problem." Never mind that millions of Americans scream about liberal bias in the media; all the journalists can say is "You're the one with the bias!" The emperors of alleged objectivity have been naked for quite some time now, and sadly, they're the only ones who haven't noticed. Or as Andrew Sullivan, the very perceptive observer of all things American, so elegantly puts it, "Only those elite armies of condescension keep marching on, their privates swinging in the breeze."